Data processing systems may be provided with an electronic calendar application. An electronic calendar application may allow persons, called users, to maintain and coordinate, on the data processing system, individual on-line schedules called electronic calendars and to schedule meetings among users maintaining such electronic calendars. To schedule such a meeting, a user may input desired meeting attendees, such as a requester and a target with whom the requester wishes to meet. The user may also input one or more proposed dates, times and durations for the proposed meeting. The electronic calendar application accesses the electronic calendars of the proposed attendees, the requester and the target, and determines whether they are available to attend the meeting on the proposed date and time for the proposed duration.
Many times, employees receive multiple calendar meeting invitations for the same time period, or for overlapping time periods, and this causes the employee to have to choose which meeting or portions of meetings they are going to attend. However, there are still deficiencies with regard to scheduling and attending meetings, especially meetings that have been canceled, postponed or rescheduled. Consider the following scenario. A user receives calendar invitation for meeting B, but meeting A is already scheduled at that same time slot (or overlapping time slot). The user declines meeting B, because he/she can only attend one meeting at a time, and has decided meeting A is more “important”. Meeting A is rescheduled before the scheduled time for the meeting to begin. Now, user has free time to attend meeting B, but because he/she initially declined it, he/she has lost the meeting information and/or has forgotten there was another meeting at this time, and consequently misses it.
Conventional methods and systems have attempted to electronically address the general concept of scheduling meetings. U.S. Pat. No. 5,774,867 issued to Fitzpatrick et al. describes a method and apparatus are provided for camping on an electronic calendar. This invention determines, in response to an input of a date, a time and a duration of a proposed meeting between a meeting requester and a target, that a conflicting event appears on the target's electronic calendar. This invention also monitors the target's electronic calendar to detect the removal of the conflicting event, and schedules a meeting between the requester and the target on their electronic calendars in response to the detection of the removal of the conflicting event
U.S. Pat. No. 6,856,962 issued to Yonemitsu describes a schedule management system includes a schedule data table which stores the schedule data including an identifier of a schedule owner, the time zone, activity and the state of the schedule. A schedule data registration unit accepts a schedule reservation request, determines whether the schedule registration is permitted or not based on the schedule state of the schedule data existing in the schedule data table and the definition data, and when the schedule registration is permitted, and registers the reservation schedule in the schedule data table. A schedule data approval unit accepts a request from the schedule owner for approving/disapproving the schedule and rewrites the schedule state of the corresponding schedule data in the schedule data table. A schedule display unit accepts a schedule display request, determines whether the existing schedule is displayed or not based on the schedule state of the schedule data existing in the schedule data table and the definition data, and displays only the schedule data determined for display.
Although other efforts have attempted to address scheduling concerns, there remains a need for a software enhancement to calendaring tools to handle this situation.